Indian troops quell village clashes

AP, LUCKNOW, India

Hundreds of troops have been deployed to quell deadly riots and clashes between Hindus and Muslims sparked by the killing of three villagers who objected when a young woman was being harassed in northern India.

Nine people were killed, including an Indian broadcast journalist and a police photographer, when the two groups set upon each other with guns and knives in Kawal Village, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, police said yesterday.

The violence quickly spread to neighboring villages in the state’s Muzaffarnagar District on Saturday night.

“A curfew has been imposed in three riot-hit areas of Muzaffarnagar,” Home Minister of Uttar Pradesh R.M. Srivastava said. “The situation is still very tense, but under control.”

Soldiers were going door to door to search for weapons. A state of high alert was declared for the entire state, which has a population of 200 million people.

The clashes broke out on Saturday after thousands of Hindu farmers held a meeting in Kawal to demand justice in the Aug. 27 killing of three men who spoke out when a woman was verbally harassed.

State Minister of Minority Welfare Mohammad Azam Khan said that some people at the meeting gave provocative speeches calling for Muslims to be killed.

The farmers were attacked as they were returning home after the meeting, senior police official Arun Kumar said.

Gunfire was reported from several areas of the village. Within hours clashes broke out in neighboring villages, Kumar said.

A leader from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party said tensions had been simmering since the three men were killed in a tea shop last month.

“Had the killers been arrested, the situation might not have gone out of hand,” Vijay Bahadur Pathak said.

Uttar Pradesh was at the heart of some of India’s worst communal clashes in December 1992, after a Hindu mob razed the 16th-century Babri mosque in Ayodhya.

The government has warned that India is seeing a rise in communal violence, with 451 incidents reported already this year, compared with 410 for all of last year.

Tensions were expected to escalate in the run-up to next year’s national elections, Indian Minister of Home Affairs Sushilkumar Shinde told reporters in New Delhi on Saturday. He said all 28 of India’s states should stay alert and improve their ability to gather intelligence.

Communal violence last month left two dead and 22 injured in a village in Bihar State, east of Uttar Pradesh, according to Indian media.

Outbreaks have also been reported in Uttar Pradesh’s Shamli District, as well as in the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir.